Tuesday, March 19, 2013

NEA, IPEDS, MLA, CLE Rank Dawson Community College Higher than NYU

Therein you will find out
a lot about what's happening in higher ed, like this, "public
colleges and universities are getting shortchanged," and this: "gender gap shows no
sign of shrinking."

You know, new ideas and
new information that will empower you to think in a creative new way about how
to manage the challenges of the future. My favorite has to be
this:

Contingent faculty members who provide instruction without the benefit
of tenure or permanent employment

make up a significant
portion of the teaching force

in postsecondary education.

You know, that just makes
sense to me, and it's nice to see what's just been a hunch of mine
authoritatively established as the real McCoy. I mean, I know I've provided
instruction without benefit of tenure, or even—it's embarrassing to admit
this—without even the protection afforded by plain old permanent employment.

And I’ve done it a lot.

What can I say? It's just
the heat of the moment, I suppose, and my own personal weakness—I love to
teach.

What is a Significant Portion?

So, how many contingent
faculty have been providing instruction in a risky manner?Readers will want to know. However, I'm
unable to locate any numbers or percentages in NEA’s Special Salary Issue.

We do learn some
things:

1) The majority of
contingent faculty appointments are part-time!

2) The percentage of
full-time contingent faculty has been growing!

3) The median pay for a
3-hour class is $2700!

Fifty Shades of Community College

Look, I’m busy, so I'll
just look at the first college on each state list—that’ll be all community
colleges—and we’ll see about that significant portion thing. What I’ve got for
you here is, as usual, from the Modern Language Association’s wonderful Academic Workforce Data Center, which, as you all know, uses data from the pretty wonderful Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systemto tell us what percent of
faculty the nation’s colleges and universities are are non-tenure stream. What makes the Academic Workforce Date Center better than the IPEDS itself is that you can get at the data in a wink, whereas at IPEDS itself you need at least two winks and a long nap.

Some rules: in what follows, the percentages are percentages, of total faculty, for those that are rode hard and put away wet, in the higher ed game, every day. That's the percentage
of that institution’s total faculty who are adjunct or contingent, or non-tenure
stream, or as I sometimes say, adcon. Now, remember too, as NEA just told you, most of these “without benefit
of tenure or permanent employment” folk are part-timers.

So, Alabama? First on the list is Alabama Southern Community College,
and there you’ve got adcons at 50% of total faculty. That's almost all
part-time, which is the usual pattern: any exceptions, places where most of the
adjunct/contingent faculty are NOT part-time, I’ll note.

Alaska

Prince
William Sound Community College. 82%

Arizona

Arizona Western
College. 100%

Arkansas

Arkansas
northeastern College. 100%

(More
than half of these are full-timers.)

California

Allan
Hancock College. 75%

Colorado

Aims
Community College. 100%

Connecticut

Asnuntuck
community College. 87%

Delaware

Delaware
Technical and Community College-Owens. 100%

District of ColumbiaN/A

(This is sad. You know how
they don’t have any representation

down
there? Well, they don’t have community colleges either.)

Florida

Brevard
Community College. 79%

Georgia

Abraham
Baldwin Agricultural College. 54%

Hawaii

Hawaii
Community College. 55%

Illinois

Black
Hawk College. 100%

Indiana

Ivy
Tech Community College-Bloomington. 100%

Iowa

Des
Moines Area Community College. 100%

(Looks
like these contingents are almost 100%full-time. That's pretty unusual, isn't
it?)

That's right—83% of the Dawson Community College faculty are genuine tenure track or tenured full-time faculty! There's only 30 of
them, sure, but still. Another 10 points maybe, that almost looks like New York Universityupside down. Dang.

for comment on this issue. That's just a hunch. But, hell, I probably couldn't get the janitor,

or somebody from the faculty senate over there to comment on this article.)

Nebraska

Central
Community College. 100%

Nevada

College
of Southern Nevada. 73%

New Hampshire

Great
Bay Community College. 100%

New Jersey

Atlantic
Cape Community College. 78%

New Mexico

Central
New Mexico Community College. 100%

New York

Adirondack
Community College. 64%

North Carolina

Alamance
Community College. 100%

North Dakota

Bismarck
State College. 66%

Ohio

Belmont
Technical College. 100%

Oklahoma

Carl
Albert State College. 100%

Oregon

Blue
Mountain Community College. 72%

Pennsylvania

Bucks
County Community College. 75%

Rhode Island

Community
College of Rhode Island. 60%

South Carolina

Aiken
Technical College. 100%

South Dakota

Lake
Area Technical Institute. 100%

(Most
of these are full-timers.)

Tennessee

Chattanooga
State Community College. 71%

Texas

Alvin
Community College. 63%

Utah

Davis
Applied Technology College. 100%

Vermont

Vermont
Technical College. 54%

West Virginia

Blue
Ridge Community and Technical College. 100%

Wisconsin,

Blackhawk
Technical College. 76%

Wyoming

Casper
College. 45%

So, there you have it, for a
bunch of community colleges, anyway. Certainly does look as if you've got a significant portion of the teaching force there providing
out-of-wedlock instruction, I guess you might call it, without the blessings and the benefits of the real thing. That's not good. I mean, water on the side two times and no whiskey in sight?
On the other hand, I’m not
one to complain, and what’s good for the goose and so-forth adds up this: there
must also be a pretty substantial portion in some of these places—I mean, just
you look at the numbers yourself—who are in stable, long-term relationships
with their colleges, marked by affection and mutual respect and so-forth, perhaps not in a constant state of romantic elation because that's not always to be expected after the intoxicating transport of early courtship, but settled and happy and looking forward to a long life together so long as that blessing may flow, for evidence of which I ask you to please see this recent and touching PBS News Hour report:

Colleges and Universities see Graying Workforce

Holding on to Coveted Positions

You tell me if that’s not
so. Go ahead. And while you’re at it, go tell New Faculty Majority the same,
and maybe even the Adjunct Project. They all want to hear some sort of sad sack kind of
thing, sure.

But listen up. As to NEA’s
role in all this? I say any union that’s been able all these years to keep
Dawson Community College a whopping 83% full-time tenure-track faculty, well,
that’s a labor organization been doing something right!

Now, of course, I'm no
statistician, and there may be a reason, or a couple or three even, for some of those
figures not coming in at that high Dawson bar, such as:

1) Most adjunct/contingent
faculty at community colleges are part-time by choice and don't need the money
anyway, being instructors of welding or merger law, purely for the love of it, and controlling great ironworks, or shipyards, maybe, or legal practices, or even holding down one or two vital government positions. 2) They've inherited
great wealth and are yearning to give back, or some such thing. Some of them, the
women mostly, just can't help it, either, please remember, because of their natural giving dispositions, and since they're mostly well enough
off anyway, having married vice-presidents or various members of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, we could leave them alone and strictly out of any future planning on this matter.

3) Might be that my sample
is flawed, and, in fact, most NEA-affiliated community colleges will turn out, on restudy, only some 17% adcon, like Dawson Community College, and then most of those could be yoga instructors maybe, and highly
appreciative of all forms of
flexibility which, as we know, is an often praised virtue of this form of
employment.

4) It could be worse, and
probably will get so in not so long, what with the MOOCS and all, and so
there's other things to worry about.

All of which, then, taken
together, would seem to require further collection of facts, the study and
analysis thereof, the subsequent production and making available of
reports, discussion of which, being invited in this or that forum, will perhaps
allow movement on identified fronts to be contemplated in a mature and serious
manner, a thing for which I'm sure we all of us devoutly yearn.

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